Polling analyst Nate Silver blasted Kamala Harris' campaign officials on Wednesday, saying they acted like they had "no will of their own" in a podcast interview.
During their appearance on Pod Save America, Harris' campaign chair, Jen O'Malley Dillon, and Harris' senior adviser, Stephanie Cutter, criticized President-elect Donald Trump for avoiding traditional media interviews during the election season.
"Trump did none," Cutter said.
"Literally none," host Dan Pfeiffer responded.
And Trump "got no s*** for that," O'Malley Dillon said.
Cutter noted that the Harris campaign "got tons of s*** that she wasn't doing enough media." O'Malley Dillon called it a "double standard."
But Silver appeared to have little sympathy for their views.
On X, formerly Twitter, he pointed out that Harris "didn't do a solo network interview until late September," just over a month before Election Day.
"Which who cares, fine, the networks don't matter so much," Silver wrote. "Then she did a bunch toward the end of the race. But she was legit not doing a lot of traditional media. That was the campaign's choice, not some conspiracy."
In a subsequent post, he said, "The Harris campaign folks are the most non-agentic people I've encountered in a position of comparable decision-making authority. They don't even see themselves as victims so much as Non-Player Characters with no will of their own."
Newsweek reached out to a spokesperson for the Harris campaign for comment on Wednesday.
Harris' top campaign officials appeared on Pod Save America for their first post-mortem interview since the vice president conceded the 2024 election to Trump.
O'Malley Dillon, Cutter, campaign manager Quentin Fulks, and top campaign adviser David Plouffe addressed a host of questions, including why Harris was reluctant to publicly criticize President Joe Biden, the campaign's debate about Harris appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience, and what Democrats need to do to win elections moving forward.
However, the interview drew criticism from some progressive and left-leaning figures who said that Harris and her senior campaign officials haven't publicly acknowledged making any mistakes that contributed to her defeat.
"Also, is it too much to ask for a little humility and self-reflection from the people whose strategies failed badly?" The Nation writer Jeet Heer said on X in response to Plouffe's contention that Democrats "have to dominate the moderate vote."
Lindy Li, an adviser on the Democratic National Committee's finance team, also criticized the Harris campaign, telling NewsNation that they were "self-congratulatory" during a call with top donors on Tuesday.
"I'm just frankly stunned that there was no sort of post-mortem or analysis of how we can do better," as a party, she said. "It was really just patting each other on the back, congratulating each other for, I'm not sure what."
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